== Modern CPU power usage varies unpredictably based on what you're doing I have both [[an AMD machine ../linux/WorkMachine2017]] and [[an Intel machine ../linux/HomeMachine2018]], both of them using comparable CPUs that are rated at 95 watts TDP ([[although that's misleading TDPMisleading]]), and [[I gathered apples to apples power consumption numbers for them ../linux/PowerConsumptionV]]. In the process I discovered a number of anomalies in relative power usage between the two CPUs. As a result I've wound up with the obvious realization that modern CPUs have complicated and unpredictable power usage (in addition to all of the other complicated things about them). In the old days, it was possible to have a relatively straightforward view of how CPU usage related to power draw, where all you really needed to care about was how many CPUs were in use and maybe whether it was integer or floating point code. Not only is that is clearly no longer the case, but what factors change the power usage vary from CPU model to CPU model. [[My power consumption numbers ../linux/PowerConsumptionV]] show one CPU to CPU anomaly right away, where an infinite loop in two shells has one shell using more power on a Ryzen 1800X and the other shell using more power on an i7-8700K. These two shells are running the same code on both CPUs and each shell's code is likely to be broadly similar to the other, but the CPUs are responding to it quite differently, especially when the code is running on all of the CPUs. Beyond this anomaly, there is also that this simple 'infinite shell loop' power measurement showed a different (and higher) power usage than a simple integer loop in Go. I can make up theories for why, but it's clear that even if you restrict yourself to integer code, a simple artificial chunk of code may not have anywhere near the same power usage as more complex real code. The factors influencing this are unlikely to be simple, and they also clearly vary from CPU to CPU. 'Measure your real code' has always been good advice, but it clearly matters more than ever today if you care about power usage. (The corollary of 'measure your real code' is probably that you have to measure real usage too; otherwise you may be running into something like my Bash versus [[rc https://github.com/rakitzis/rc]] effect. This may not be entirely easy, to put it one way.) It's not news these days that floating point operations and especially the various SIMD instructions such as [[AVX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions]] and [[AVX-512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512]] use more power than basic integer operations; that's why people reach for [[_mprime_ https://www.mersenne.org/download/]] as a heavy-duty CPU stress test, instead of just running integer code. MPrime's stress test itself is a series of different tests, and it will probably not surprise you to hear that which specific tests seemed to use the most power varied between my AMD Ryzen 1800X machine and my Intel i7-8700K machine. I don't know enough about MPrime's operation to know if the specific tests differ in what CPU operations they use or only in how much memory they use and how they stride through memory. (One of the interesting differences was that on my i7-8700k, the test series that was said to use the most power seemed to use less power than the 'maximum heat and FPU stress' tests. But it's hard to say too much about this, since power usage could swing drastically from sub-test to sub-test. I saw swings of 20 to 30 watts from sub-test to sub-test, which does make reporting a 'mprime power consumption' number a bit misleading.) Trying to monitor the specific power usage of MPrime sub-tests is about where I decided both that I'd run out of patience and that the specific details were unlikely to be interesting. It's clear that what uses more or less power varies significantly between the Ryzen 1800X system and the i7-8700K system, and really that's all I need to know. I suspect that it basically varies between every CPU micro-architecture, although I wouldn't be surprised if each company's CPUs are broadly similar to each other (on the basis that the micro-architectures and the design priorities are probably often similar to each other). PS: Since I was measuring system power usage, it's possible that some of this comes from the BIOS deciding to vary CPU and system fan speeds, with faster fan speeds causing more power consumption. But I suspect that fan speed differences don't account for all of the power draw difference.